In praise of the thin tea: notes from a season of whisking badly
For six months I made a bowl of usucha every morning, mostly poorly. The bad bowls taught more than the good ones, and the bad bowls were almost all of them.
The shop on Sanjō-dōri that sold me my first chasen handed it over without ceremony, in a paper sleeve printed with the maker's name in dry sumi. I asked the woman behind the counter how long it would last. She looked at me for a moment, the way a piano teacher might look at someone holding a violin, and said, "It depends entirely on how you treat it." That was November. By February I had broken three of the hundred tines and stopped counting.
What the whisk asks of you
Usucha, the thin tea, is the form people learn first and dismiss fastest. Two grams of powder, sixty milliliters of water just under a boil, thirty seconds of brisk W-strokes from the wrist. The recipe fits on a receipt. The doing of it does not. A good bowl wears a pale jade foam, dense and even, almost the texture of cashmere. A bad bowl looks like a pond with leaves on it — clumps drifting, a slick where the powder failed to wet.